Thursday, July 9, 2009

Forgotten Saints for July 9th

The Appearance of the Theotokos at Dafni in Antioch

This feast goes back to an ancient Syrian tradition in which the Theotokos appeared to Saints Peter and John at a spring of water in the area of Dafni, which is one of the suburbs of Antioch. This happened after the Spirit of the Lord carried the two apostles from Sion, Mother of the Churches, and placed them in the region of the City of God, Antioch.

The Restoration of the Temple of the Three Saints Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael.

We have no details about this feast.

For these two commemorations, Fr. Touma relies on three Syriac manuscripts of Orthodox provenance. According to his view, the Temple of the Three Holy Youths was likely in the region of Antioch, as it is only mentioned immediately following the celebration of the Appearance of the Theotokos in Dafni and seems to have been connected to it in some way.

4 comments:

To my knowledge it is not but my knowledge is very limited about the Suryani calendar. And, with almost all the items I'm posting here from Fr. Touma's book, the Rum Church of Antioch has not yet restored regular celebration of most of its unique commemorations, due to factors discussed in the post immediately previous to this one.

Yeah.... there may very well have been a lot of overlap between Rum and Suryani calendars in the region.. certainly there is for saints of the first few centuries... but, figuring all that out would definitely require a lot of manuscript work.... and, well, the Sayfo took its toll of manuscripts...